TIGHAR members
will recall that we have long known of a strange legend which told of
human remains and a woman’s shoe found by the island's first Gilbertese
settlers. Our 1991 discovery of a shoe matching the style and size Earhart
was wearing led us to suspect that at least part of the legend might
be true and that we had identified the spot where the bones had been
found. This past March, a meticulous archaeological examination of the
site produced a few more artifacts and the remains of a very old campfire.
Was the legend true? Was this where something tragic happened? Or were
we constructing a fantasy around unremarkable objects?

Then in June, World
War II historian and author Peter McQuarrie (TIGHAR #1987) was doing
research in the national archives of Kiribati in Tarawa when he stumbled
upon a file labeled “Discovery of Human Remains on Gardner Island.”
The file contained a series of 16 official communications between Gerald B. Gallagher, the resident British administrator on Nikumaroro
in 1940 and ’41, and various senior British officials. These previously undiscovered
documents confirm that a partial human skeleton, badly damaged by coconut
crabs, was found on the island in 1940 lying under a tree, with the
remains of dead birds, a turtle and a campfire nearby. With the bones
were part of the sole of a woman’s shoe, a Benedictine liqueur bottle,
a box with numbers on it which had once contained a sextant, and a sextant
component thought to be an “inverting eyepiece.”

Gallagher suspected
the remains of being those of Amelia Earhart and reported the discovery
by radio to his superiors at the British Western Pacific High Commission
in Fiji. He was ordered to ship the remains and artifacts to Fiji for
analysis and to keep the entire matter “strictly secret.”
However, on the way to Fiji, the ship carrying the bones stopped at
the colonial headquarters in Tarawa where the senior medical officer,
with no information about their possible significance and feeling slighted
that he had not been asked to evaluate what he described as “wretched
relics,” confiscated the bones and pronounced them to be those
of an elderly Polynesian male who had been dead at least 20 years.

Present-day forensic
anthropologists have expressed the opinion that the accuracy of such
an identification by a colonial doctor in the early 1940s with access
to only a partial and badly damaged skeleton is highly suspect. Nonetheless,
based upon this casual dismissal, British officials dropped the matter
and the Americans authorities were apparently never notified. The file
contains no attempt to explain away the woman’s shoe, the Benedictine
bottle, or the sextant box. Gallagher died a few months later and the
mystery of the castaway of Gardner Island died with him, living on only
as a murky island legend.

From the documents
in the file, which will be published in their entirety in the new TIGHAR
Tracks, it is apparent that the place where the castaway was found
is, indeed, the very place identified by TIGHAR. The shoe we found in
1991 is almost certainly the mate to the one found by Gallagher and we
know that shoe to be American in origin, dating from the mid-1930s and
identical in style and size to Earhart’s. Our campfire is, likewise,
the one he noted at the site. We know that the remains and the artifacts
he found were eventually shipped to Fiji and we are now trying to determine
if they may still survive in some official repository there. Meanwhile,
we're doing our best to track down the numbers reported as being on
the sextant box. We already know that the presence of an “inverting
eyepiece” suggests that the instrument was for aeronautical use.
We’re also trying to push forward with the identification of the two
additional artifacts we found at the site this year – a small washer-like
object and a partially-burned fragment of what appears to have been
a can label.

Many, many questions
remain. Why only one skeleton? In 1991 we found two very different shoe
heels, indicating the presence of two pair of shoes and, possibly, two
people. Did one survive long enough to bury the other? Whose remains
were found? Who may still be buried nearby?

Whatever the questions
and whatever the answers, the discovery of Kiribati National Archives
File No. F13/9/1 represents the most dramatic archival find in the sixty
year history of the search for Amelia Earhart.

As
For The Airplane...

State-of-the-art
forensic imaging of aerial photography has uncovered what may be the
wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra on Nikumaroro.

The photographs
were examined by Jeff Glickman, founder of Photek, Inc. of Hood River,
Oregon. This year’s expedition was plagued by severe weather which forced
the expedition ship, on its return voyage, to seek the sheltered waters
of Funafuti, an atoll in the nation of Tuvalu. While there, we happened
upon islanders who told of seeing aircraft wreckage along a specific
part of Nikumaroro’s shoreline in the late 1950s. The area described
was one which we had never suspected and never searched, but we did
have high quality aerial photography collected from various archival
sources. We reasoned that it might be possible to ascertain the credibility
of the anecdotal accounts by seeing if there was material present at
that location in the old aerial photos which looked and acted like aluminum
debris. Such confirmation would be significant because no aircraft is
known to have crashed at the island during or since World War Two.

By digitizing and
enhancing the aerial photographs using a variety of both standard and
proprietary techniques, Glickman was able to image five objects which
meet the criteria for aluminum debris in precisely the area where wreckage
was reported seen. Four of the objects appear in aerial mapping photos
taken in 1953 and appear to represent a debris field on the island’s
reef-flat. The fifth object appears in a 1988 photo of the beachfront
taken by the Royal New Zealand Air Force. It is, of course, impossible
to say that the objects are definitely aluminum, much less that they
are airplane debris.

What the photographic
enhancements do show is that there is material present on the island
which exhibits the characteristics of aluminum airplane debris in just
the place where people say they saw airplane debris. Most importantly,
the photos provide a specific area in which to make an intensive search
for wreckage. The apparent Electra parts found on the island to date
have all been recovered from the atoll’s abandoned village and clearly
were brought there from somewhere else. This agrees with the former residents’
claim that children playing on the wreckage sometimes brought pieces
home to the village.

A Photo Of The Wreck?

The possibility
that the wreckage of the Earhart aircraft may have washed ashore on
this particular section of beach has prompted the re-examination of
a previously discounted piece of photographic evidence. About ten years
ago a snapshot of what appears to be a wrecked Lockheed Electra in a
tropical setting was circulated among aviation historical authorities
as a possible photo of the Earhart aircraft. It was ultimately dismissed
as being impossible to validate. The picture was allegedly taken shortly
after World War Two by a British seaman serving aboard the submarine
tender HMS Adamant, but the story doesn’t check out. Royal Navy records
do not show the individual as being among the ship’s company and Adamant’s logs do not show it being in any region where Earhart could have conceivably
gone down. On the other hand, relatively few Lockheed Electras served
in the tropical Pacific and none is known to have been lost under circumstances
which might result in such a photo. Smithsonian botanists examined the
foliage visible in the picture and determined that the wreckage in the
photo is probably within a few meters of an ocean beach on a South Pacific
island. The type and condition of the vegetation visible in the photo
is consistent with the beachfront on Nikumaroro. With both anecdotal
and aerial photographic evidence independently suggesting that the wreckage
of Earhart’s plane may rest on Nikumaroro, the wreck photo is being
subjected to new scrutiny. Of particular interest is the recollection
of one of the Funafuti witnesses that, “Some white people came
once in a government boat … to take pictures of the airplane parts.”

How
About An Engine With A Serial Number?

Shortly after our
return from the Pacific in March we were contacted by an individual
who told of recovering a very old, beat up, radial engine which he took
to be a Pratt & Whitney R1340 from the reef-flat on the western
end of one of the atolls of the Phoenix Group, possibly Gardner Island.
This occurred in 1971 when he was working for the USAF as part of a
missile test program which used the islands as a target area. The recovery
was done purely out of idle curiosity using one of three large Air Force
helicopters based at Canton Island. The engine was slung back to Canton
and eventually discarded in a specific location there. TIGHAR researchers
have thoroughly investigated this story through USAF records and everything
checks out.

Incredible as it
may seem, there is every reason to believe that one of the engines from
NR16020 rests at this moment on Canton (now Kanton) Island. The island
has an excellent 6,000 ft runway and jet fuel is available. We’ve been
trying ever since April to find somebody willing to donate the use of
a long range business jet (it’s 2,000 miles from Hawaii to Kanton) so
that we can go get that engine. We haven’t talked about this publicly
before for obvious security reasons, but now it’s time to cast the net
wider in the hope that somebody out there can help. And besides, if
you don’t know just where on the island to look, you ain’t gonna find
it. Kanton is huge.

NIKU
IIII Expedition Dates Set

With all of this
great new information, we obviously need to get back out to Nikumaroro
as soon as we can put together another expedition. We’ve set those dates
for August 24 to September 29, 1998 and we have reserved the same ship
we used in March, the 110 ft motor-sailer Nai’a out of Fiji,
to take us back.

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